I recently went back over the Octatrack’s Arranger, determined to learn the thing once and for all. I made a few notes where the documentation felt lacking, dunno if these are useful:
The manual’s description of looping could be improved if it simply told you that when a loop row is reached, it branches back to the specified row (default 000) and does so as many times as you specify (default infinity).
A useful pointer for the Arranger Editor would have been: Remember to move the cursor away from a field that opens a menu in order to hit enter and play from that point. So if you’re doing lots of mutes, you can’t simply move one step to the right but have to move left past mute, transpose and tempo.
There is only one tempo maintained throughout. Therefore, the sentence that says ‘if there is no setting, the tempo is the main BPM’ really means nothing. Any BPM that is set takes over and remains the main BPM even when you leave Arrange mode, regardless of what it was before.
Make sure tracks are unmuted before you start using the Arranger Editor or you’ll be well confused.
Within Arrange Edit, the changes you make to mutes don’t take effect until the next time the row is engaged.
Just those few things would have saved me a few furrowed brows, but I’m old and dim.